Två som pratar (Two people talking)

Marie-Louise Ekman has been a major player in Swedish cultural life for over six decades. As an artist, director, playwright, head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Sweden’s national stage for ‘spoken drama’) and professor and rector of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, she has relentlessly left a strong mark on our cultural identity. With a constant drive to experiment with new expressions, from painting to film and television, theatre and scenography, she has shown an indomitable talent and hunger for development.

Not least in recent years, Ekman has repeatedly proven that she is an artistic force to be reckoned with, despite now being in her eighties. In autumn 2023, for example, Ekman transformed one of the Stockholm School of Economics’ classrooms into an art installation and a completely unique learning environment. The work Testamentet (The Testament) features parts of Ekman’s studio. Saved items, tools, memories and original works are displayed as they were until very recently in Ekman’s studio in Södermalm, Stockholm. In addition to the installation Testamentet, Ekman also painted several original works directly on the walls of the classroom, such as Dam och klocka (Lady and clock). This massive feat was followed up in 2024 when Ekman turned parts of Stockholm’s celebrated Bar Zeppelin into a permanent art installation by painting several of its walls.

Less than a year afterwards, in the autumn of 2025, the Firestorm Foundation acquired Samtal i luften (Conversations in the air), Två som pratar (Two people talking) and Kvinna i tecknade rum (Woman in drawn rooms) at Ekman’s major solo exhibition Förklara allt - Nu. / Explain everything – Now.

The extensive presentation of works was carried out as a dual show where CFHILL joined forces with the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. In between them, the two institutions brought together works from 1968 to the present, offering a rare opportunity to encounter the broad variety of Ekman’s career, as well as the immediacy of her current practice. Spanning nearly six decades, the parallel exhibitions traced her sharp yet absurdist vision through the years, whilst also introducing new works shown for the first time.

The presentation at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts consisted of new paintings (more than fifty of them, executed between 2023 and 2025), installations (much appreciated by the visitors), and glass sculptures (including an impressive four-metre-high ceiling chandelier from the renowned Murano glassworks in Italy).

Several of the paintings referenced celebrated earlier works, like Fiskbullar i hummersås / Fishcakes in Lobster Sauce(1968, appliqué on satin, 121 x 174 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), that Ekman executed in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Nudity, body orifices, reproductive organs, lonely women longing for sexual encounters, defecating dogs and other themes that once caused outrage and scandal (whilst casting her as Swedish art’s ‘enfant terrible’ back then) could now be seen as the mature artist’s dignified nod to her past, acknowledging all that had been in the last six decades.

A very good example of Ekman’s refined 2025 dialogue with earlier iconic works can be found in Kvinna i tecknade rum (Woman in drawn rooms) (2025, oil on canvas, 180 x 110, the Firestorm Foundation). In this large-scale painting (typical of Ekman’s production for the 2025 exhibition), she depicts a woman standing in front of eight scenes from the artist’s iconic 1973 series Hemma hos en dam / At Home With a Lady, which art critic Birgitta Rubin referred to (in ‘Här är sex sevärda utställningar i Stockholm’ / ‘Here are six exhibitions worth seeing in Stockholm’, Dagens Nyheter, 6 September 2025) as ‘the unabashed classic’. The 1973 series depicts a lonely woman (captive in an interior, like an animal in the zoo, reliving the same reality day after day) acting out her desires.

A potential reason for Ekman to recycle the 1973 series could be the artist’s strong narrative focus. Hemma hos en dam / At Home With a Lady is characterised by the cramped pictorial spaces with warped one-point perspectives, where dreams, passions and disappointments run amok in a heightened reality. Could it be that Ekman, more than five decades later, wants to point out that even though many things have changed over the years, human experiences, more or less, remain the same? Or is it merely a humorous nod to the past, as if the artist were revisiting her pictorial diary ahead of the 2025 exhibition?

Ekman stated ahead of the exhibition that she regards her paintings to be the equivalent of conventional diary entries (‘Michael Storåkers in conversation with Marie-Louise Ekman’, Förklara allt – Nu., exhibition catalogue, 2025): ‘It’s my way of understanding existence. I don’t write a diary; I paint it. Each painting is an attempt to see something that is happening... or has happened... in me, or in others, in the room.’

The new works, however, made it apparent that Ekman, rather than getting caught up in nostalgia and reminiscence, is constantly moving forward. Clear examples of this were her decision to increase the scale of her canvases (several of the new paintings measured 180 x 110 cm) and to further explore the possibilities found in the field of glass. Ekman’s specific drive to keep moving forward in her work was pointed out by Maria Lind (born 1966, Swedish curator, writer and educator who, since 2023, has served as the director of Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Giron/Kiruna, Sweden) in the exhibition catalogue (Michael Storåkers, ‘En intervju med Maria Lind’, Förklara allt – Nu., 2025):

Marie-Louise never stands still but is constantly involved in new projects and trains of thought, even though certain motifs, subjects, materials and stylistic features recur. Innovation and continuity go hand in hand, while she is ready to re-evaluate things, such as her own relationship to feminism. While she did not describe herself as a feminist in the 1970s, she has done so in the 2000s. Integrity is a key word, artistically and as a person, and a loyalty to the necessity of maximising artistic freedom, especially in times of bureaucratic rule and authoritarian tendencies here and there.

Ekman herself expressed it the following way in an interview with, Swedish National News Agency, TT (Aftonbladet, ‘Dubbelt upp för taggad Marie-Louise Ekman’, 2025-08-21): ‘Art is my diary entries, my way of deciphering existence. I depict what I experience. I don’t want to repeat myself. But certain themes never leave me. Women are always present, as are superiority and subordination. These can be varied endlessly; they are inexhaustible.’

Provenance

Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, Förklara allt - Nu. / Explain everything – Now., 23 August - 4 October 2025.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation